


Six Little Lambs

by EdenDavis



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Angst, Multi, Orphanage, Orphans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-09 17:48:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1992072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdenDavis/pseuds/EdenDavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One-shot prequels for 6 of my favourite members of the clone club.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Helena's Playground

**Author's Note:**

> This series will act as a prequel to the stories of my favourite clones. Season 3 spoilers inside.

Helena looked out the convent window, muttering to herself in Ukrainian. _O ni! vony povernulysya,_ she thought to herself. Oh no, they’re back. She was talking about the other orphans, of course.

There weren’t very many of them. They would come and go so frequently that little Helena, the only “regular,” had stopped bothering to make friends. She smoothed back her unruly curls and looked out at the field below. The group of three children, ranging in ages from four to twelve, had been taken on a field trip to the nearby mausoleum. Helena was forbidden from joining because earlier that day, she had bitten one of the little boys on the forearm. He had bled a little bit. _Boh_ , God, she thought to herself. How people overreact!

The three children below her were gathered together like little warmongers, each wearing the crimson-red hats that were convent-issued attire. They looked like dry matches, she thought absently to herself.

She’d been locked in the room for the past six hours, and she was really starting to need to use the bathroom.

“ _Meni potribno popysaty!”_ She shouted, _“Dayte meni popysaty!”_

As if they would come to help her. She had been here for as long as she could remember, and in that whole time she had learned one important lesson: she had no family, and she never would. After all, what family would let their daughter whither here, with strict rules and even stricter nuns? The place was as rough as a knife’s edge, and no place for children. She knew that well enough, even at the age of twelve.

Almost immediately after relieving herself in the corner of the room, Helena heard the door begin to open. Helena poised herself to run past the nun’s skirt-covered legs, but stopped when she saw whom it was.

“Sister Dariya!” She exclaimed happily.

There were few benevolent nuns at the institution where Helena lived, but she loved Sister Dariya. Most importantly, she allowed herself to believe that Sister Dariya loved her too.

 _“Moya dochka,”_ Dariya purred, “my daughter.” She took Helena into her arms, suppressing the urge to wrinkle her nose at Helena’s “accident” in the corner. “They’ve said that I can take you out now, dear Helena.”

Helena felt herself begin to cry, and held it in. She’d been practicing.

Dariya ran a finger over the girl’s bony cheek. “They told me to give you ten lashings, but I seem to have forgotten that. I won’t tell if you don’t,” she said, releasing Helena.

They both turned, hearing footsteps in the hallway.

“AND DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!” Dariya shouted at her, “AND GO BRUSH YOUR HAIR, IT IS AS IMPOLITE AS YOU ARE, GIRL!”

Dariya regarded the blonde little girl with kind eyes, willing her to understand that she was just trying to keep her place in the church. After all, she wasn’t the only one for whom the convent was a last resort.

The footsteps in the hallway drew closer. Finally, Mother Hanna walked by without pausing to regard her Daughters. She did not have time for foolish charity cases like Dariya and Helena, and she especially didn’t feel like punishing the two rebels. Not a thing went on in the convent that Mother Hanna didn’t know about, and that included Dariya’s leniency. She made up for it with her own strictness, anyways.

“Can I go outside today, _sestra_?” Helena asked the nun, once Hanna was safely away from the door. 

“I am sorry, but you know the rules.”   

Helena was permitted to leave the shelter of the convent once a week, and only ever at night. She had been told that she could visit the mausoleum today, but only if she took the underground tunnels. She’d messed even that up. 

 _“Ale_ chomu!” She shouted, “but _why?_ ”

Dariya wished that she knew, but all she was told was that Helena was never to leave the convent in daytime. _It’s for her own safety_ , Mother Hanna and the more experienced nuns would say. Their word was law; it was gospel, so Dariya let the matter drop a few months ago.

Helena had snuck out in daylight hours a couple of times over the years, but she always got beaten severely for it. Eventually she stopped trying not because of the pain, but because experience taught her that the sun hurt her eyes anyways. She wasn’t used to light other than the fluorescent type in her living quarters, and soft candlelight downstairs. Sunlight was so different – it sucked the pain out of bruises, and instead left Helena’s skin with little pink burns that changed colours when she prodded them.

She looked out the window again at the little matches outside, running close to one another and then breaking away. A tall figure was walking up the path, dressed all in black. None of the nuns were that tall, and Helena looked quizzically at the silhouette. Who was that? A man?

Helena hadn’t seen very many men in her life, as they weren’t allowed in the walls of the convent. Sometimes a brother or father would visit one of Helena’s Sisters, and the girl would steal glimpses of the brutish, hairy figures.

But the man walking up the path looked different. He was less hulking, more precise. He moved with the deliberateness of a surgeon, or like someone who had been to the convent many times before.

The lithe figure of Mother Hanna ran down the path towards the man, wringing her outstretched hands 

_“NEMAYE! NEMAYE! NEMAYE!”_

Helena heard the shouting all the way from her room on the second floor of the building. She curled her hands around the bars on the window, gripping them tightly. Other nuns were coming out to usher the children inside. 

There was hushed whispering in the hallway.

Helena could make out only one word – or was it a name? _Tomas._


	2. Ethan's Rachel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nine-year-old Rachel Duncan enjoys games with Ethan.

“Come here, daddy,” Rachel shrieked as she inched herself ever closer to the edge of the slide. It was a long plastic spiral that made her wonder how it was possible to spin so fast without falling ill.

“Ethan,” he corrected her. “Call me Ethan, honey, we have been over this.”

With that, she slammed the soles of her patent leather shoes against the edges of the slide. Her little body zigzagged down, ricocheting against the edges. By the time she reached the inflated mat at the bottom, her hair stuck up like Einstein’s.

“Look, Ethan! My hair!”

Mr. Duncan looked over the edge of his newspaper at his adopted daughter and smiled. She was growing so quickly, it seemed.

He was excited to initiate the self-awareness process in her.  She certainly seemed very mature for her age, and Susan and he had agreed many years ago that they would inform Rachel of her origins once she reached the age of 9.

“What caused your hair to stand up on end, Rachel?” He asked the question with a quiet tremor.

“Static electricity, Ethan.” The young girl answered almost mechanically at first, being careful not to trip over the syllables or have another accident.

Ethan always frowned when she called him “dad.” She wasn’t sure why, as it had been acceptable when she was younger. Rachel had added that to the many other questions in the back of her mind. Every day there were more, it seemed. _I suppose that’s growing up_.

“Excellent, darling!” He praised her with a warm smile, taking a lolly out of his leather jacket and holding it out.

Before she could take it, he would ask another question. Harder, this time. Mr. Duncan hesitated slowly. “Would you like to play Curiosity, dear?”

Rachel’s face broke into a wide, gap-toothed grin. She loved opportunities to prove herself, and she loved playing Curiosity even more. It was a game they started playing around the time the tutors started coming to the house.

Unlike Ethan’s normal questions about math and science, playing Curiosity meant that there would be no right or wrong answers. Instead, Ethan would ask a question only vaguely related to the science and social science that she already knew. He would seldom tell Rachel if her answer was off the mark or not, but she could usually tell by the way he looked at her afterwards.

“Alright,” he murmured. That meant the game was starting. “Rachel I’m going to ask you a question that your lessons have never answered before. Remember to reason it out for yourself before answering. Never state the first thing to enter your mind.

She nodded solemnly, and absent-mindedly brushed the slide-dust from her knobby little knees.

“Do you think that it would be possible to create an organism with only one biological parent?”

Mr. Duncan let the question hang in the air for a moment, and studied the girl’s immediate reaction. Her eyes hardened with the impassive concentration of a scientist.

Recently she had begun being self-conscious in front of him when she didn’t know the answer to a question. It was a development he tracked with interest, as it implied that he and Susan had correctly instilled in her a strong thirst for knowledge. This, they hoped, would help her circumvent a strong emotional reaction when she became self-aware.

Mr. Duncan made a few notes in his leather pocketbook, and looked back up at the child.

“Well I suppose –“ she began to trail off, unsure of her answer. _One parent. One parent. How could there be one parent?_ Rachel had been aware of biological sexual reproduction from a young age. Her parents had never gone into inappropriate details, but the girl was well versed in the creation of life at a cellular level.

Rachel took a quick breath and continued to answer with gradually increasing confidence. The more she spoke, the more her father’s eyes widened with pride. She knew she couldn’t be too far off the mark.

“Well, Ethan, I suppose that if you were to take an egg from the original organism and remove all DNA from its cells. That would be from the nucleus, right? Well if you did that and somehow fertilized the egg, there would be no genetic properties from the original parent.” She smiled, feeling her father’s pride. “Oh, and you would need someone to carry the egg and deliver it, unless that could be done mechanically.”

“Yes, that’s called a surrogate,” he answered, handing her the unwrapped lolly. Mr. Duncan waited for her to return to the small playground in their backyard before he made some more notes in his notebook.

Rachel skipped over the woodchips to her single swing, and sat down to enjoy the treat. _Surrogate,_ she thought, turning the word over in her mind. _Well in that case, it seems a great deal easier to have one biological parent than two!_ The girl dragged her feet a little in the dust, making sure not to let her shoes get too dull.

A safe distance away, Ethan began to dial the number for the DYAD institute on his cellular phone. _It’s time,_ he thought, feeling a pang of sadness. He remembered her first steps, her first words. 

The phone, pressed to his ear, connected with the other line. He cleared his throat.

“The subject is ready.”


End file.
